After Pete's statement about sexy Dwarves and seeing the tease of Thorin's image I thought that a short dark and handsome dwarf was a good. possibility. I am not really surprised. I knew that there was going to be one heck of a blow out here on the boards if it came along. Most everyone expected variations on the theme of Gimli and really never tried to think of Dwarves as a real culture with a population with genetic variability and therefore a range of appearances. Kili might just be the ugly Dwarf from the Dwarve's perspective. (Lets hope he grows out of it, maybe a few battle scars will help...) I see the strategy of pushing the boundaries of expectations generally a good approach to art. It creates something fresh and new and drags us out of the doldrums of our existence. I see this approach in Chris Nolan's "Dark Knight" and J.J. Abrams "Star TreK", both of which I am extremely fond. I think PJ is going for a reboot of Middle-earth. I think Guillermo del Toro inspired him, pulled him out of the idea that these two films will just be remakes of The Lord of the Rings. I was near convinced of this when Peter went with 3-D. The choice of a cutting edge format was a big signal that The Hobbit was not going to be a comfortable match-up with with its sequels (that happened to get filmed first). Hell I wouldn't be surprised if the framing devise was shot in 2-D and it go to 3-D once the story hits Munchkin...er. Hobbiton. But that is an aside.

You asked what I thought of the two new Dwarves. Well I must say I was suprised and Kili's look does not align with my preconceived notions coming from both the book and Peter's Lord of the Rings. It is not Tolkien but is Tolkien re-imagined. I will not be a naysayer at this point. It is far too early to tell how this will all end up. I will say one thing. The production has not been boring so far. Kangi Ska Resident Trickster & Wicked White Crebain Life is an adventure, not a contest.

TVNZ's picked up on the controversy. http://tvnz.co.nz/entertainment-news/hot-hobbit-pics-spark-debate-4301729 But I do believe Kili won't look as airbrushed as he does in this photograph given PJ's grimy style, and will look more proportionate on screen. I agree with everyone Kili's looks could be a source of humour, with Fili jibing about ugly he is and how he needs to grow a beard.

Even with all of this fun teasing, my hope that the performances are so good that the costuming is only a small part of what makes the actors convincing as dwarves. And even with that, the costuming is pretty good. It's mostly just Kili's hair that bugs me.

Now let's take some of your quotes out of context and see how well they fare...
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One of the first things i learnt about philosophy and arguing is that a person who refuses to acknowledge grounds on which they can be proved wrong can never be proved right

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Not to liken fangirls (i.e. in this case those who defend the 'dwarfiness' of Kili's look) to murderers, but in terms of murdering a fictional character they're a bit like a bent jury

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Women are much more convincing liars than men and have a remarkable capacity to raise their hormones to the level of poetry but here it is wholly transparent.

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i think anyone who tries to defend Kili's look is either a Estrogen Islander or a contrarian.

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Emotional wounds make the ladies swoon.

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I can see no earthly reason other than cynically appeasing the lowest common denominator to abandon every shred of the dwarven aesthetic and the response of some women on this (yourself included) and their attempts to defend this just ring so phoney it's infuriating.

I see the Cartesian bias that abstract rationality and pure ideas are to be preferred over anything that actually engages with life. Which, many have argued, does in fact stem from a problem with the feminine - or rather, those aspects of human character that Cartesian dualism insist are feminine, even though men and women have them equally (you're not saying men do not respond viscerally to attractive women now are you?).

It's not actually an either/or situation. It is possible to be intelligent AND have emotions and enjoy the physical side of life. The way we imagine our lives is the way we are going to go on living our lives.

I think you did a pretty good job trying not to generalize too much to offend.
[In reply to]

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Women are much more convincing liars than men and have a remarkable capacity to raise their hormones to the level of poetry but here it is wholly transparent.

This one statement, however, you may want to adjust, as generalizing women to be liars is pretty harsh. A good rule of thumb is to say "many women" or "some women." (I'm just saying this as a friendly suggestion, by the way, because I could see you were trying to tone it down, and I very much appreciate that.)

Please keep in mind that some of us women aren't as interested in the dwarves being handsome as we are interested in them being convincing dwarves. I'd like to see Turner be more dwarfish myself, and at this point, I'm hoping that his performance will be what makes him a dwarf, because clearly, at the very least, his hair isn't doing it for me.

the terms "murdering a fictional character" do sound like something a lawyer would say to rile up the jury. When the LOTR movies came out, the equivalent phrase was "raping the book."

Such burning and passionate (yet trite and cliched) phrases are vitally necessary to establish that one is A Real Fan. We'll be seeing a lot more rape and murder as we get more Real Fans on the forum in the coming months. It's not going to be pretty.

I argued then and I argue now that the book remains intact, as do the characters.

Narf!

I hope you don't mean that someone else's ideas have the power to destroy your own.

DD does have a point. Like Ben Kenobi said, the minds of certain types of people are easily influenced. That's what Hitler did. And we don't want to be like Hitler, do we?

(And with that Reductio Ad Hitlerum, Godwin's Law is invoked!) ****************************************** Brothers, sisters, I was Elf once. We danced together Under the Two Trees. We sang as the soft gold of Laurelin And the bright silver of Telperion, Brought forth the dawn of the world. Then I was taken.

Brothers, sisters, In my torment I kept faith, And I waited. But you never came. And when I returned you drew sword, And when I called your names you drew bow. Was my Eldar beauty all, And my soul nothing?

...considering that film is a visual medium and that the characters must be visually different from one another to a certain extent. I remember thinking that the Hobbits of LOTR didn't look very hobbitty at the time (Frodo, Merry and Pippin are too slender, Martin Freeman's Bilbo is technically too slender as well, their clothes aren't as described in the novels etc etc) ~ but that didn't bother me a bit once the film started. To be honest, the first time I saw 'Fellowship', my heart sank when Viggo uttered his first sentences as Aragorn. By the end of the film, I couldn't have imagined anyone else ever playing Aragorn!

(I love being the outlier in someone else's data!!) ****************************************** Brothers, sisters, I was Elf once. We danced together Under the Two Trees. We sang as the soft gold of Laurelin And the bright silver of Telperion, Brought forth the dawn of the world. Then I was taken.

Brothers, sisters, In my torment I kept faith, And I waited. But you never came. And when I returned you drew sword, And when I called your names you drew bow. Was my Eldar beauty all, And my soul nothing?

****************************************** Brothers, sisters, I was Elf once. We danced together Under the Two Trees. We sang as the soft gold of Laurelin And the bright silver of Telperion, Brought forth the dawn of the world. Then I was taken.

Brothers, sisters, In my torment I kept faith, And I waited. But you never came. And when I returned you drew sword, And when I called your names you drew bow. Was my Eldar beauty all, And my soul nothing?

There's a difference in how women admire men and how men admire women. A lot of what these women said was jokingly, and to be silly. It's fun to be silly, and it doesn't mean we all prefer a guy to be good looking over convincing in his role.

If you ever notice the difference between a strip club with female strippers and one with male strippers, you can see some of this. Often, the strip clubs with female strippers are filled with men who stare more and seem to take it all more seriously. Strip clubs with male strippers are more often filled with giggling women, who are just out having fun and not taking it seriously at all.

Testosterone plays a huge role in thinking about sex. We all have it, men and women. But men have it more, and it can make sex and the imperative to have it a much stronger, more serious instinct. In women, it's not so strong, and we think about sex much less often per day. So when we talk about attractiveness in men, there's less of that imperative. And I think this is where many men get annoyed, frustrated, confused. What we mean as being fun, admiring, but silly at the same time, men can often misinterpret as us being more serious.

I'm sure some of these women are being serious, but most of these quotes you pulled out sound like playful joking to me.

Can't wait to see him shield-surfing down the stairs of Erebor, or climbing up the side of a huge warg, killing the Goblin riders, then sliding down its snout.

This is going to be so cool!!

(BTW, how'd somebody so reasonable and level-headed as you get into this discussion?) ****************************************** Brothers, sisters, I was Elf once. We danced together Under the Two Trees. We sang as the soft gold of Laurelin And the bright silver of Telperion, Brought forth the dawn of the world. Then I was taken.

Brothers, sisters, In my torment I kept faith, And I waited. But you never came. And when I returned you drew sword, And when I called your names you drew bow. Was my Eldar beauty all, And my soul nothing?

Still, previously my images of Dwarves consisted of the archetypes from Disney, D&D, and WOW. Nice to have my mind expanded away from decades long cliches.

I was so worried about 13 identical little Dwarves running around with only colored hoods to distinguish them. This is looking better and better! ****************************************** Brothers, sisters, I was Elf once. We danced together Under the Two Trees. We sang as the soft gold of Laurelin And the bright silver of Telperion, Brought forth the dawn of the world. Then I was taken.

Brothers, sisters, In my torment I kept faith, And I waited. But you never came. And when I returned you drew sword, And when I called your names you drew bow. Was my Eldar beauty all, And my soul nothing?

Women being better liars does not mean they lie more frequently
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I would consider the ability to lie well quite a useful one. I actually wish I was a better liar, as I can't lie to save my life (I have some kind of psychological block about misleading others and it sometimes gets me into trouble). Commenting on the disparity of general lying capabilities between the genders doesn't strike me as particularly offensive – and from my experience, it's got some truth to it...

And BTW, as I get more geriatric I'm becoming less degenerate, but I hope to remain as narfy as ever!

(That's "narfy", as opposed to "smurfy.") ****************************************** Brothers, sisters, I was Elf once. We danced together Under the Two Trees. We sang as the soft gold of Laurelin And the bright silver of Telperion, Brought forth the dawn of the world. Then I was taken.

Brothers, sisters, In my torment I kept faith, And I waited. But you never came. And when I returned you drew sword, And when I called your names you drew bow. Was my Eldar beauty all, And my soul nothing?

Most grown women have a laugh over fancying guys on screen. It's not something to take seriously. And the assumption that his look will will have us all drooling in the aisles is just plain wrong. (He's too pretty for a start!) I didn't fancy any of the hunks in LOTR. I watched it for the story.

As for Kili's look, yes he doesn't look like an archetypal dwarf. I would happily slap a big beard on him but I think there's been a huge overreaction about the hair. By the time he's been on the journey, it's going to look more like Aragon's straggly mess than anything else. These are glossy studio portraits - teasers to get us talking in the run up to Comic Con. I love that the dwarves have different looks and can't wait to see the rest of them.

BTW, I hope James Nesbitt isn't the bald one... after he spent all that money on a hair transplant!

So more than just one of the Company would possibly be part Elf.
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Present version of The Hobbit:

"As I was saying, the mother of this hobbit – of Bilbo Baggins, that is – was the fabulous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across The Water, the small river that ran at the foot of The Hill. It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife. That was, of course, absurd, but certainly there was still something not entirely hobbit-like about them, and once in a while members of the Took-clan would go and have adventures."

Tolkien's abandoned revision of The Hobbit from 1960 (published in volume 2 of The History of The Hobbit):

"As I was saying, the mother of this hobbit – of Bilbo Baggins, that is – was the fabulous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across The Water, the small river that ran at the foot of The Hill. It was often said (in other families) that the Tooks must have some elvish blood in them: which was of course absurd, but there was undoubtedly some thing queer about them, something not quite hobbitlike, according to the manners of the Shire: an outlandish strain maybe from long ago. Every now and again Tooks would go off on adventures." ****************************************** Brothers, sisters, I was Elf once. We danced together Under the Two Trees. We sang as the soft gold of Laurelin And the bright silver of Telperion, Brought forth the dawn of the world. Then I was taken.

Brothers, sisters, In my torment I kept faith, And I waited. But you never came. And when I returned you drew sword, And when I called your names you drew bow. Was my Eldar beauty all, And my soul nothing?

Has anyone considered that the studio pressure to mitigate mostly-male-Middle-earth may have been more successful than we at first realized? Gimli tells us that dwarf women often can't be distinguished from the men... Look at Kili's soft, downy fringe, that slender, willowy build...

I can see it now, just as Kili is about to fall defending lord and uncle... off comes the helmet to reveal that that absolutely glorious nimbus of flowing hair...

"It is no man-dwarf that stands before you, but Kelli, Daughter of Dis!" (Perhaps it is the guys who should be ogling this cheesecake?)

In seriousness though, the look does not bother me overmuch. What the look might imply as to what is done with the character has me a bit nervous.

"It struck me last night that you might write a fearfully good romantic drama, with as much of the 'supernatural' as you cared to introduce. Have you ever thought of it?" -Geoffrey B. Smith, letter to JRR Tolkien, 1915